Am I just reading a lot of good speculative fiction lately, or is speculative fiction being extra awesome recently? The beginning: Pandemonium has a killer premise in a lot of ways. First, the basic premise baldly stated — a world exactly like ours except that starting in the 1940s/1950s, random acts of demonic possession started happening — is awesome. Second, the particulars of the premise — there are only about 100 known demons, who possess people for brief periods of time (a few minutes to a few days, usually), act out fairly consistent scenes, and then jump to another victim…
5 CommentsReading the End Posts
The Tournament of Books is on, and the Jennys are here to talk about it! We also review Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni and play a literary Winter Olympics game. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 18 Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much). Here are the contents of the podcast if you wish to skip around: Starting at 1:03…
2 CommentsA while ago I accidentally checked out Crux, the second book in a series about a drug called Nexus that expands the human brain’s capacity and permits brains to connect directly to each other. Despite its turning out to be a sequel whose original I hadn’t read, I really liked it. Nexus is the book I meant to check out, so I went back and got that one the next time I was at the library. The beginning: A government agent called Samantha Cataranes has been sent to gather information about a science computer genius guy named Kaden Lane, who…
13 CommentsThe beginning: Tana wakes up after a party to find that everyone else is dead. She’s surrounded by the bodies of kids she’s known since kindergarten, and there’s a scrape of a bite on her leg that might mean she’s going to become a vampire. When she goes upstairs, she finds two people still alive: Her ex-boyfriend, Aidan, who has been bitten and is in the process of becoming a vampire, and a vampire boy called Gavriel, chained to a bed. When Tana finds them, this is what she thinks: No one else was going to get killed today, not…
34 CommentsSurprise comics podcast for you! Whiskey Jenny wasn’t able to record this week, so Randon and I brought back COMICS PODCAST for your delectation and delight. In this episode we read Kelly Sue DeConnick’s run on Captain Marvel, G. Willow Wilson’s new Ms. Marvel, and Matt Fraction’s deeply weird new comic series with Image Comics, Sex Criminals (hear us out). You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 17 Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the…
3 CommentsI happened across Brown at the library, and I checked it out because Richard Rodriguez mentioned James Baldwin as an influence. Oh, Richard Rodriguez. You know the way to my heart. When one has picked up a book on account of its having been influenced by someone one loves and admires, it is best not to think about it too much. Think about it too much, and Rodriguez inevitably comes off the worst, as would almost any essayist if you stacked him up next to Baldwin. At times, Rodriguez is beautifully evocative. Some passages are gorgeous: “Her eyes are needles,…
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